


Wheels and Chimes

by sophiagratia



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Time Travel, solo sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:23:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trapped in time, Helen Magnus plots her first move. {Immediately post-'Tempus'}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wheels and Chimes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abydos_dork](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=abydos_dork).



> Title taken from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, 'The Colder the Air'.

Helen left James at the turn of the stairs. 

She intended a quick farewell, but he held her back. His hand pressed into hers some small hard thing, and she knew before he said it – 

‘My house in Sussex.’ Of course. ‘Do you remember –’

‘Yes, of course I do, James.’ She cut him off before she could be tempted to say, _better, and more, than you do_. Oh, what he had to look forward to. She was sure he saw her unspoken thought in her however-guarded expression. He was, after all, like that. She kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll return the key by post, when I’m ready. Soon. Goodbye, James. And thank you.’ _For everything,_ she meant, _for now and before and what is to come_. He looked like he understood. But how could he. How could anyone.

She crossed the courtyard, quick-footed. To her rooms, then on to Victoria for the train south. It occurred to her that she might stop on the way for a cup of tea and a sandwich to go, that she might hail a taxi. She was not going to get used to this. And, she thought, she should have asked James for cash. 

_Ah, well,_ she thought, _I shall simply have to rob myself._ She nearly smiled. 

She rifled quickly through her things – not hers, this other woman’s, this woman who was at once her and not-her, her former self who had her own whole life to look forward to. Quick work, and she was on her way, valise in hand. Refusing to spare a backward glance at the bluff façade of the Sanctuary, she set her quick steps westward. Victoria, then Brighton, then Eastbourne, then – then she would decide what then. 

Shifting her valise from one hand to the other, she remembered, suddenly, an incident with a maid – remembered accusing the girl of stealing fifty pounds and a modest assortment of winter clothing. 

Helen stopped mid-stride, unmindful of the shouts of drivers and the press of foot-traffic. She could not be sure whether this memory had simply resurfaced after long oblivion, or her mind had somehow reoriented itself to accord with her decision to pilfer her own wardrobe – her own and not her own. Shaking off a sudden dizziness, she resolved not to think on it too hard, and to write to James to see that he looked after the girl. 

No. She could not do that. She was doing too much damage to the course of events as it was, and she intended to do much more. She could not afford magnanimity, nor even simple compassion. She picked up her pace, shoving aside the question of how many more lives she might carelessly destroy before she caught up with history.

* 

Victoria Station, at least, had been – was – _was_ a far pleasanter place in 1898 than it had been – would be – was, when Helen last visited it, one hundred and twelve years ahead of herself. 

She struck out a hand to steady herself against the counter at the ticket window. _Temporal dysphoria_ , she idly termed her sudden spell of dizziness, and laughed. 

‘Excuse me, madam, but are you quite well?’ She could hardly answer such a question, harmless as the woman on the other side of the counter seemed. 

‘Yes. My apologies. Eastbourne, please. First. No return.’ _No return_. She nearly giggled. _Delirium is a perfectly natural response to this degree of disorientation,_ she told herself. Still, she would need to eat something – and sit down – soon, or she’d go down in some obscure margin of history as a woman who cracked up on the floor of Victoria’s concourse. Recorded only in the journals of an obscure practitioner of the new science of psychotherapy. 

Vaguely conscious that she had overpaid the nonplussed vendor, she took her ticket, stifling another unaccountable laugh, and placed one foot carefully in front of the other, crossing the worn boards of the vast station hall. 

She fixed her attention there, on the worn wood. It would be replaced, replaced again, and again. She remembered lino; she walked on worn wood. She had dim memories of renovations, more renovations, the constant laborious changing of London in history. One foot in front of the other, she paced as she waited, incurious of the wary glances of her fellow travelers. These boards, she thought, were an archive; each step an inscription; each groove and cut a written legacy of travellers past. This history, this stuff of bootsteps and pretty heels, of ambling and dashing and human movement, would be destroyed without a thought. She did not remember when. Soon, perhaps, and then again, and again. She breathed carefully, placed one foot in front of the other, and decided she would remember that long ragged scratch (a bootheel’s loose nail), that half-moon skid mark (the pretty stumble of soft Italian leather soles), that wine-dark stain (an unremembered accident of history). 

She had never given herself much occasion to think about history, as such, before. She had been too busy creating it, or trying to. This time, perhaps, she would pay better attention.

* 

Beyond the scars and clouds of industry, where the air cleared and the land began to roll, Helen drew deep, careful breaths that fogged the windows of her first-class compartment. She could hardly spare the money for the ticket, yet dressed as she was, she would have been needlessly conspicuous anywhere but here. And here, she was alone.

Alone. 

She couldn’t tell if what was rising through her lungs into her throat was laughter, a sobbing wail, or simple bile. She swallowed hard. She folded her gloves in her hands. She looked out at the downs, rolling greenly beneath a fine cloud of winter-evening mist. She breathed in, and out. One hundred and thirteen years. Twenty-two minutes to Brighton. One hundred and thirteen years. 

Again. 

She stepped down from the train in Brighton. She thought of James there, walking by the sea, beautiful in the sun, seventy years on from now, but she could not smile. Thirteen and a half minutes later, she boarded another train, sat down in another compartment, folded her hands in her lap and breathed carefully, in, out. Forty-three minutes to Eastbourne. 

A young man sat down across from her and bid her good evening. She nodded. He unfolded his newspaper. She fixed her eyes on the date. 

Thirty-eight minutes to Eastbourne. The train rushed into a tunnel and she startled at her reflection in the window. Across her cheek, uncannily, a newsprint date. 

She breathed in, and out. She watched the vapour of her breath pattern the glass. She watched the downs. 

One hundred and thirteen years.

She breathed in, and out.

*

‘Doctor Magnus!’ She whirled on the platform, startled to be addressed by her own name and title, as though she had left those, too, behind – ahead – when she stepped through the looking-glass. 

The beekeeper. The beekeeper. His name, she fumbled for his name – she had met this man either one hundred and thirteen years or four months ago, by one reckoning and another. She should recall his name. ‘Billings!’ she managed, just in time, with a just-managed smile. He doffed his hat, a kindly caricature. 

‘Doctor Watson sent no word he’d be coming, blast him, be haranguing me about dust and greenhouses all the same, the old –’ he paused, as though her mood were contagious. She wondered. He spared a quizzical glance for her hair. ‘...But you’re not alone, Doctor Magnus?’ _Oh, not this old joke again_. She wondered what he’d make of knowing that this woman, when she traveled alone, walked with a revolver strapped to her calf and a blade concealed at her waist.

‘I’m afraid I am, Billings.’ How easily startled helplessness settled on her. ‘I don’t suppose I might prevail upon you and poor –’ the horse, the horse, shit, what was it ‘– _Bailey_ , for a trundle to the house?’ She smiled, sheepishly. 

Astonishing. 

He wagged his cane at her, like something out of a period setpiece. _Bloody hell_. ‘You’re lucky I happen to be headed out that way anyhow, Doctor,’ that sarcastic edge to her title, like he wanted her to know he refused to believe it. ‘Come on then, can’t keep the bees waiting.’ What bees did after dark in December was anyone’s guess, but Helen was too relieved to find Billings like an idle agent of fate waiting to solve the problem of her poor planning to worry overmuch about it. 

‘Thank you, Billings. I shall owe you a tremendous debt,’ she said, falling into the arch flirtatious style he’d remember from another, identical, but lighter-hearted woman’s visit four months gone. She climbed up onto his creaking cart beside him with so easily feigned a laugh at her own fumbling femininity that it startled her almost to tears.

*

She closed the door. She remembered its heft, its creaking hinge, the scrape it made across the uneven floor, as though it were she, and not some other woman with her name and her face, who had been here at the end of such a distant, such a recent summer. 

She pulled the pin from her hat, lifted her hat from her head, discarded her hat on the rack by the door. Her back to the mirror, she unbuttoned her coat, hung her coat, too, on the rack. She lifted the lamp Billings had found for her, located a switch on the wall, and blew the lamp out. 

The kitchen flickered into quiet, yellow light. The blue panes of an electric lamp reflected in the window, and that she remembered, too. _Bless you, James. Bless you, Nikola._

She sat down at the table, ran her hands across its distressed wood, remembering James’ hands and hers, together here over tea, over dinner, over breakfast. Four months ago, and then again, and again, for decades. How much he had to look forward to.

She unsheathed the knife at her waist and slapped it down on the table. It trembled, for a moment, under her palm. She pushed it away. 

She unfastened her jacket’s dozen hook-and-eye fixtures, tugged her shirtwaist from her skirt, and arched awkwardly back to pull loose the laces of her corset. James had done this for her, here, once. It had been a much more dramatic affair, then, and far easier. She tugged at the busk – more hooks, more eyes, bloody hell – and sighed as it fell open. She leaned forward, feeling in her belly the relief of it. She lay her head on her arms. And fell asleep. 

*

She and James were of a height, but he did not have her hips or her belly or breasts, and that made her task more difficult than it needed to be. Standing in front of the wardrobe’s spotted mirror, she smoothed his waistcoat (the finest grey tweed, houndstooth) with one hand, and ran the other into the deep pocket of his trousers (felted Italian wool, a deeper grey). She couldn’t help admitting that she cut a just scarcely noticeably handsomer figure in his clothes than he did. And not a hook or eye or lace or brooch or busk in sight. 

She sat to pull the supple leather of James’ tall riding boots over her calves, wiggling her toes in the space they left her. She spared a smirk for these boots – just the slightest shade too lovely, too fine, for a certain standard. A glimpse of his future self, here, in these boots. How much he had to look forward to. The thought, for a wonder, was a warm one.

It was too bad, she thought, that James lacked the absent-mindedness that might have led him to leave his pocketwatch behind. Its fine antique brass chain would have completed the ensemble admirably. Still, just as well: she had little enough need to count her time in seconds, minutes, or hours. And little enough desire to count it at all. 

She had woken at sunrise with a desperate twist of pain running from the base of her neck all the way down her spine. Yet that was a small price to pay for her first dreamless sleep in recent memory, she’d thought, and there had been, too, the sweet surprise of finding a bottle of milk, a loaf of fine-smelling fresh bread, and a basket of eggs on the front step – the silent predawn benevolence of Billings. She’d retracted her ungenerous thoughts of the previous day, and set about the business of washing off the grime of travel and rummaging for clothing she could live with.

Now, the open bedroom window was letting in a breeze that spoke of a fine day, warm for winter, that called to her. Breakfast could wait, and so could thoughts of what in hell she planned to do next. 

She leaned to fetch a pencil from the secretary desk, with a small smile for the memory of its highly polished wood under her bare thighs on her third visit here – eighteen months hence, by her idle calculation. Knotting her hair loosely, she stabbed the pencil through it, whisked a fine tweed blazer over one shoulder, and took the stairs down two at a time. She fetched James’s tall walking staff from its corner, his fedora from the coat rack, and set off. 

* 

Wind-flushed and breathless, she paused atop a grassy bluff.

The morning mist; the diffuse struggling sunlight; the green hills; the distant sheep. All as she remembered, and all much as it would yet be one hundred and thirteen years hence. A place beyond time, she thought, foolishly.

And the sea. At last the sea, there a long stretch of green from where she stood, dimly grey beneath the mist and growing brighter. These hills, this wind, the sea. And somewhere out of sight, across the sea, the coast of Normandy. She gripped her staff to stop her stumble: memory and prolepsis in one instant. That dizziness of yesterday. There was no laughter in it now. 

She had not thought of that. Of living all that again. Of watching the world wracked and tossed by all that, again. She set her teeth against the dizziness, the rising nausea that came with the flashes of catastrophe that accompanied that thought. Not her catastrophe alone; the whole world’s. Again.

The sea. She fixed her gaze there. Only the sea, benevolent on this calm day, in this corner of the world that was at peace now and would be for years yet. Now, and for years yet. Time in a straight line, now and then tomorrow and then next year, by slow steps. That was a lie, but it was one she needed. She fixed her gaze on the sea. 

One foot in front of the other, down toward the sea, toward the windswept cliffs. 

*

She stood overlooking the sea, one hand fast against her hat, holding it down in the strong, steady wind that blew her blazer open, whipped her trousers around her thighs. The wind, the sea, the fading mist, the sun. The sea. She breathed deeply the salt air. She nearly smiled. Here, on the seeming edge of the world, here she could, now, perhaps, begin to think of steps forward.

And then came unbidden the one thought she hadn’t realized she’d been forbidding herself: Ranna Seneschal. 

There was nothing for the dizziness this time, for the dizziness of that impossible thought. She sat carefully, folded her legs, lay her staff across her knees, bent her head. She breathed in, and then out. The wind toyed with the fine hair at the base of her neck. The staff pressed into her knees a kind of pain that steadied her. She breathed in, and out. 

Ranna. The thought came clear, suddenly. She had wondered what her next step should be. Now she knew. Step one must be Ranna. The clarity of it, that thought, Ranna’s name, was almost frightening.

Ranna.

Breathing deeply, Helen bit the heel of her hand to hold back the edge of laughter she was beginning to fear, a sting in her eyes that might have been the wind and might have been anything else. 

A memory slid into place. 

She straightened carefully, twisted James’s hat in her hands, and squinting, watched the sea. 

She could not be certain of it. She closed her eyes, tried to focus on that memory. She could not be certain, but the image was clear. Ranna’s eyes, at their first encounter: a flash of recognition, then the swiftest shift to sorrow. Ranna’s almost-smile, at their first farewell: nearly wry, nearly knowing. Ranna’s words to her when first Ranna’s hands unbound her hair, ‘How I’ve looked forward to this, Helen,’ which had seemed only lovely, only full of desire, in that moment when their lips parted just a breath apart – and which now seemed to mean something entirely new, something Helen could not understand. Their final farewell, Ranna’s hand on her cheek and that sorrow in Ranna’s eyes.

The problem of memory in nonlinear time. The problem of too much memory and too much time. Did Ranna recognize her, that first day in Praxis? Did Ranna remember, that day, a history that Helen had not yet lived? Or had Helen, now, just now, made a decision that would change the course of time? 

She drew a careful breath. Had she and Ranna truly been lovers at all, or was that whole history – that whole set of sense-memories where Ranna’s hands and lips and hips and tongue and breath lived in Helen’s skin – simply another trick of time? 

She opened her eyes, flattened her hands against the sun-warmed grass, and watched the sea. Her memory was all she had. She could not afford this, this unstable flickering. She could not afford betrayal by her memory, her only asset. If she could not rely on the memory of Ranna’s lips at her throat, of Ranna’s eyes on her body, Ranna’s hands undressing her, the coy timeshifting taunt in Ranna’s recognizing voice, what else might there be that she might undo with any one decision?

She watched the sea and waited, as though to see if she would simply unravel right there, come apart in time and disappear. 

And yet, she thought at length, bringing fingertips to the hollow of her throat where Ranna had first kissed her, there was something to that: memory was all she had. With time stretching and contracting, flexing and moving behind her and before her, all she had to center her was memory. She breathed in carefully, her fingertips tracing the path of Ranna’s first quick kisses up her throat, over her chin, to her lips. What mattered was what she remembered. 

And here, now, alone on this clifftop over the sea, in the wind, at the center of all that dilating time, she pressed her fingertips to her lips and anchored her reality in her memory of Ranna Seneschal. 

Memory: the adrenaline rush of the first encrypted emergency call. Then Ranna’s apologetic almost-smile, greeting her belowground. Helen’s anger, Helen’s _How dare you_ , and then Helen’s surprise at how quickly her anger faded under the not-quite-pressure of Ranna’s fingertips on her cheek.

Here, now, alone on this clifftop, Helen ran her own thumb across her cheek. Her lips brushed the heel of her hand; her teeth grazed her knuckle. The sharp quick stab of arousal that came with memory – that dizzy sense, again, at first. She drew a careful breath, hand flat across her sternum, warm through the fine linen layer of James’s shirt. 

(Memory: Ranna’s hand on her knee in the transport. _I meant it, Helen, when I said I wanted to learn from you._ That uncanny soft tone of her dangerous voice. )

Helen stretched out her legs, leaning back. She watched the sea. She drew one hand along her inner thigh, remembering the vibration of Ranna’s voice against her skin there – and there, and there, and there. The silk lining of her trousers like a textile echo of what it was to feel Ranna’s voice against her skin. She raised her face to the sky, closing her eyes against the bright climbing sun. Then a twist of her fingertips around a leather button and her jacket fell open, just scarcely sensible sliding across her ribcage. She shivered, and did not try to tell herself that it was the wind.

(Memory: Ranna so close to her during their long hours in the vaults of the Praxis Central Archive. Ranna’s whispers that hinted at secrets that vast library did not contain. That instability, that nervousness, knowing that Ranna never shared all she knew, knowing that for Ranna knowledge and power were things of darkness and whispers. Ranna’s dangerous voice.)

Helen reached back and pulled the pencil from the knot of her hair, let her hand fall down between her thighs, tipped her head back, running her palm across her belly, her breasts, over her throat, fixing her focus on the free weight of her hair as it tumbled down, whipping in the wind. 

(Memory: Ranna’s hair falling across her shoulders, her breasts, Ranna’s hair trailing behind Ranna’s kisses along her skin.)

Helen lay back in the grass, breathing slowly, deliberately. Slowly, in, out, as with care and trembling fingertips she unbuttoned first her waistcoat, then her shirt. She listened for Ranna’s voice in memory as she palmed her breast and sighed, thought how Ranna’s eyes had had that way of straying, during those library hours, down her skin, drawing out a flush across her sternum. The wind raised pinpricks all across her skin, and Helen’s back arched into the memory of Ranna’s eyes on her.

(Memory, like a jump cut, a swift reversal or a jolt forward: first Ranna’s inscrutable, blush-raising gaze, then suddenly the impact of the first time – the first time, back pressed to Ranna’s bedroom door, one hand fisted in Ranna’s hair, thighs clamped around Ranna’s hand. The sheer surprise of it. How she’d cried out, so loudly, in pleasure and in sheer surprise.)

Helen permitted herself a moan, low, guttural. Not a soul for miles, and the wind to disperse the sound, she tried her voice – like a response to her own cries, both before and behind her. She pressed her hand against her belly, pressed her fingertips beneath the waistband of James’s trousers. The pressure of the seam drawing taut across her cunt dropped her moan to a growl.

(Memory: growing used to this frivolous secrecy, growing used to hearing herself tell careless evasive tales, growing used to finding herself unaccountably aroused by the subterfuge of sex.)

She rolled her hips and gritted her teeth. Beneath her fingertips, she found herself slick, and another cry, involuntary, escaped her throat. 

(Memory: the relief of Ranna, how Ranna sighed when first Helen pressed three lengths of black silk into her hands and said, _I am just so tired of all this_ , and how Ranna knew precisely what she meant.)

The pressure of the waistband on her wrist so like the pressure of those sashes as, in spite of herself, she strained against them. She strained now, reaching – quick, hard pressure of fingertips on her clit (memory: Ranna’s tongue, intent, demanding), strain of her wrist as she presses, presses (memory: her wrist strained between Ranna’s thighs, demanding Ranna who strained her wrist), the twist in her wrist as she presses inside (memory: Ranna’s hands brusque on her thighs, flipping her over; her bound wrists crossing; pain and pleasure and Ranna’s demanding body; the collapse into simple power of the distinction between pleasure and pain), her hand in her hair as it once twisted in Ranna’s, her voice echoing the sounds Ranna drew demandingly from her, her fingers twisting inside collapsed into Ranna’s fingers, her time-collapsing fingers, pressing pleasure and pain beneath the taut demand of her trousers and – 

‘Ranna!’ she yelled into the wind, and came. 

Time passed, or perhaps it did not. When she opened her eyes, snapped into the present of grass and wind and the salt smell of the sea, she pressed her fingers against her cunt, with her other hand tugged and gripped her shirt closed against the wind, and let out a deep, shuddering breath. The full reality of the moment converged on her – the sun, the sea, the wind, the grass, dirt in her hair and her clothes, James’s beautiful fine imported wool, all in disarray, her own sex-smell and the sound of her own voice on the wind.

And she began to laugh for true. 

She would stir, in a moment. She would sit up, she would sort her clothing. She would roll to her knees and press James’s hat back down over her dishevelled hair. She would walk slowly back to the house. She would make breakfast, and a cup of tea. And then she would begin to plot her first move, the steps that would take her one by one to Nepal, to Hollow Earth, to Ranna Seneschal. 

For now, she laughed. She had all the time in the world. 

*


End file.
